If you have followed me for the last few years (or watched how they are being built), you know that I am very interested in the role that technology can play to help solve global socio -economic and environmental challenges. We are to lag a trip to Ireland, I had a chance to visit Tallaght, a growing area in South Dublin, which recently underwent a significant revitalization effort. Here the community leaders, the local energy agency and AWS met to introduce the way in the hospitals and government buildings to the university campus and public housing provided heat and hot water. The program is called Scheme Topping Scheme Tallaght District, between Codema (Dublin’s Energy Agency), the council of the South Dublin, AWS and Heat Works, the first non -profit energy use of Ireland to operate the network. This program is the first of its kind on Emerald Isle, but with the latest estimates that show that district heating could provide more than 87% of Dublin heating by 2050 could be the first of many.
The district heating itself is not a new idea. People have found ways to centrally produce and distribute heat for thousands of years, from Hypocaust of ancient Rome and Ondols Korea to the 20th century in New York steam operations that warmed and cooled a significant part Heat from steam). And while these solutions are surrounded for a long time, it has always been sustainable. Many of these heating systems have joined the burning of coal and other fossil fuels for heat production, which we know is the manufacturer of the importance and driver of climate change. Recently, cogeneration equipment, such as Copenhill in Copenhagen, has provided a model to capture the heat produced by critical infrastructure, such as waste burning and its use to heat the community. Which brings us back to Tallaght and why their new district program for the heating of the district is so important for the energy future of Ireland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh4ibj4iumu
Today, Ireland is on the new energy transition from fossil Fuel and by the end of the decade has an ambitious goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 51%. To get there, local leaders are looking for new solutions to old problems. For example, Amazon was invested in three Irish window farms to deliver clean energy into the Earth’s electricity network. And in the larger area of Dublin there are new opportunities to use renewable and insufficiently used energy sources, including deep geothermal and waste heat from industrial and municipal processes (eg data centers, waste processing facilities, even breweries). Codema estimates that unused resources can produce 19 TWh approximatals, an energy for warming the equivalent of about 1.6 million houses and play an important role in Irish decarbonization efforts.
How District Heating works
District heating, simply, is warm in a centralized location (eg hot water) and then distributed to the community using isolated pipes where the heat is extracted by houses and businesses and in many cases, as with Tallaght, where the cooled by -product returns to the system To reopen.
District heating systems are an attractive possibility for communities load to reduce their carbon footprint. These systems are agnostic energy sources – they can use energy and health from various sources, including renewable sources. This flexibility allows these networks to adapt over time as soon as new technologies appear and climate targets develop. For example, they can switch from biofuel to capture recycled heat from waste burning. They also reduce the directing of home infrastructure by eliminating the need for individual boilers and hot water heaters. The ability to choose and change energy sources helps these systems to resist the future and provide municipalities and residents of flexibility, which is not always possible with other heating solutions.
From hot air to hot water and health
Servers produce heat. And for efficient operation and protecting these servers, data centers usually cool down with massive units for air handling. However, if we look at the by -product of running servers as opportunities, we see how the head can be in a positive way. In our TALLAGHT data center, hot air from servers is captured by a health unit for air handling, which raises the water temperature passing through the building to an approximately 23-28 ° C (73-82 ° Fahrenheit for my American readers) Heat Works through isolated pipes. The system takes this hot water and passes through the first of two heat pumps, where it condenses until the temperature is approximately 45 ° C (113 ° F). Hot water then passes through the second heat pump, where the water temperature increases again to 70 ° – 85 ° C (158 – 185 ° F) depending on the season. At this point, hot water leaves the Pipes Energy Center in isolated pipes and is available for customers connected to the heating system.
If the typical home could use individual hot water or boilers, in the district heating system they are replaced by units for heat interfaces that transfer hot water from the system to the building or on request. It also acts as a press break and ensures that there is no return flow.
Given that heat consumes houses and business, water that has lost courage to energy transmission, returns to the heat energy center. It passes through the pump to cool down to ~ 15 ° C (59 ° F) before it gets into the AWS data center, where the heating process begins again.
Observability
Monitoring plays a key role in any scale system, whether it is a data center, a distributed application or a district heating program. It allows design with regard to the tolerance of failures – it is known that things will fail at some point, but provides the ability to quickly idéssues and holin operations when the components drop. The TALLAGHT district heating scheme is monitored by 24/7 by thermal work. At any moment, they can see water and air temperature, pressing, flow, energy production for each heat pump – they can even detect leaks in the system up to several meters. This last is a big problem when you believe that in the past, correction crews would often rely on visual indicators such as steam to identify an escape (which is quite difficult in warmer months).
If you need an example of how important the modernization of monitoring and grids is, look for nothing but in the UK, where it loses 3 billion liters of water a day, because the metal pipes are difficult to detect in newer plastic tubes in the system.
What will come next?
The cooperation between AWS and Heat Works today adds 3 MW energy from the local data center that would have come from gas or fossil fuel. This is enough to heat about 43 000 m2 of public buildings, including the local university, library and innovation center, and reduced carbon Emons in this area by almost 1,500 metric tons per year (that is about 7.5 adult blue whales or 730 diameter 730 diameter -In the velocity of cars). In the next two years, plans for doubling the energy production and the extension of the program to residential buildings and other critical infrastructure in the community are.
The Tallaght district scheme shows the huge potential for sustainable energy systems in Ireland. And it is an excellent example of how government agencies, energy suppliers and industries in the country can work together on extensive projects that not only work on the destination of decarbonization, but can help revitalize communities and ensure reliable access to energy and heat.
And as important as the district heating program itself is the Tallaght transformation. They welcomed industries, such as Cloud Computing, invest in their youth with educational programs that take place from elementary school through the university, and local hospitals have accepted machine learning and other cloud technologies to improve the results for patients in their community. Like many components of the network supplying the heat, this model of cooperation between industry shows that when playing its role, everyone has an advantage. Give and take, input and output. In a world that seeks to cope with sustainability with connectivity and consumption, Tallaght is a plan of how industries and communities can connect to achieve amazing results. It is a model that I see in the coming years widely adopted.
Now go build!